Scott Donaldson on the “Impossible Craft” of Writing Biography

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While working as a newspaper reporter in Norfolk, Va., in the fall of 1988, I got a dream assignment. My editor told me to drive up to the College of William & Mary and interview a professor named Scott Donaldson, who had just published a biography of John Cheever. I was ecstatic. It isn’t every day a newspaper reporter gets to brush up against someone who has brushed up against a literary god.

I found Scott Donaldson in his cozy attic office on campus and we spent a long afternoon talking. Or rather, Donaldson talked while I took notes. He told me he had met Cheever just once, in the summer of 1976 on Nantucket. Donaldson drank gin and tonic while Cheever, newly rid of a life-long addiction to alcohol, drank water and tea as he talked for hours about his brother, his journals, and his many love affairs — with men and women. That one unforgettable meeting — along with the power of Cheever’s writings — spurred Donaldson to undertake a biography after Cheever died in 1982 at the age of 70. Donaldson, as I would write in my newspaper article, “seemed to enjoy having the mirror turned on him for a change. It was his turn to do the talking, and he, like John Cheever a dozen summers ago on Nantucket, had plenty to say.”

Donaldson is now 83 and retired from teaching, but he’s still writing and he still has plenty to say — about writers, the writing life, and the maddening difficulty of writing biography. Donaldson, who has produced biographies and critical studies of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Winfield Townley Scott, has just published his 18th book, Death of a Rebel: The Charlie Fenton Story, which blends memoir with biography. Donaldson recounts taking Fenton’s Daily Themes class at Yale in 1949, then falling under the spell of this charismatic teacher who would go on to write an acclaimed book about Hemingway’s apprenticeship and a biography of Stephen Vincent Benet. At the age of 41, while at work on a book about the Spanish Civil War and seemingly at the peak of his powers, Fenton jumped to his death from the roof of the Washington Duke Hotel in Durham, N.C. In Death of a Rebel, Donaldson notes that writing literary biographies “is a profession Charlie Fenton had more or less handed down to me.” An excerpt from the book, “Bomber Boy,” will appear in this summer’s issue of The Sewanee Review.

Donaldson spoke with us recently by telephone from his home in Scottsdale, Ariz.

The Millions: Before we talk about your new Charlie Fenton book, I’d like to go back to that time we met in Virginia in 1988. I dug out a clip of that article I wrote —

Scott Donaldson: Yeah, I still have a clip of it too.

TM: Really? I just re-read it, and the thing that jumped out at me was when you told the story about how after you’d finished writing a draft of your Cheever biography, his son Ben was in the process of editing a volume of his father’s letters. And you wound up getting caught in a crossfire, sitting in a room with your editor and a lawyer for a month, cutting out chunks of Cheever’s letters. Then you had to rewrite the draft. You said you were “frustrated,” but I’ve got to imagine you were going out of your mind. That wasn’t a lot of fun, was it?

SD: No, no, no. And I’ve written about that in my forthcoming book on the writing of biography. There’s a long section on my struggle with the Cheever family. This happens. I’m by no means distinctive among biographers in having run across this kind of problem. I can see mistakes I made now, as I could not have seen them in 1988.

TM: Such as?

SD: Well, I presented myself as knowing too much when I got to know the kids. And it was the children that were the problem, not Cheever’s widow so much as Susan and Ben. They’re literary folks, and they saw me as an invasive presence. I understand that, but I never really saw that there had to be any conflict between what I was doing and what they were doing. But they sure did… I’m thinking back to a lunch I had with Susan Cheever at which I made the mistake of knowing too much. This is a terrible mistake for a biographer to make when he’s interviewing or trying to get along with anybody who’s related to or was a close friend of the subject. Because they know. They have their own ideas. And whatever I know, it’s been through secondary sources. I wasn’t there at the time. Anyway, at that lunch Susan had just finished her memoir about her father, which was very, very good–

SD: Yes, excellent book. I was unhappy that she did it before my book came out (laughs) because it covered some of the same ground. So I spoke to her about the issue of quotations, and I said there’s fair use, and I know that the best writing in my book will be that of your father — thereby implying that the best writing in her book was by her father. I’m not sure she was pleased by that. But I think it’s true. One of the advantages of being a literary biographer is that to the extent you can quote and paraphrase and borrow from the work of a great writer, it sure as hell helps your book.

TM: You also mentioned, when we talked, that you felt that the cuts you had to make and the rewriting you had to do made your book a better book. Do you still feel that way?

SD: I do, I do. You lose something. You lose the flavor of a great writer, because even when they’re dashing off a letter or putting something in a journal, they’re still a great writer. I was allowed to quote up to ten words from any given passage (of Cheever’s writings) — and that isn’t much. I did it in my editor’s office with the chief lawyer from Random House, and I was slapping myself on the wrist every time I got up to thirteen words instead of ten.

TM: You mention Cheever’s journals. Back in the 1990s I wound up on a panel with the science fiction writer Orson Scott Card. Somebody in the audience asked us what we were reading at the moment, and I piped up and said, “I’m reading The Journals of John Cheever and they’re fantastic!” Then Card snapped that he hated that kind of self-indulgent, self-pitying crap — that all these writers writing about how hard it is to be a writer ought to shut up and go home. I don’t know if you saw where Geoff Dyer recently praised The Journals as Cheever’s “greatest achievement”–

SD: Really? I hadn’t seen that.

TM: Yeah, Dyer said the book was Cheever’s “principal claim to literary survival.” Who do you think is right, Card or Dyer?

SD: I think it’s somewhere in between. The Journals are certainly wonderful reading, in parts, but I can understand Orson Scott Card’s attitude. I mean, Cheever is using these journals to excoriate himself a great deal — for drinking, for sexual infidelities, for all kinds of things. It’s as if he’s purchasing leave to pursue those bad habits. But there’s also terrific writing in there. He would invent these characters – he couldn’t help it. The first time I ever saw him was at a Modern Language Association meeting, of all places, and he was one of three writers who came to do a brief talk before academics. The other two spoke about what it was like to be a novelist, but Cheever told a story. He couldn’t help it. I can’t think of any other writer who had the storytelling instinct so ingrained in his personality as Cheever.

TM: Your new book is Death of a Rebel: The Charlie Fenton Story. You open it with the first time you met Fenton at Yale in 1949, and you go on to say you admired him as a teacher “unreservedly.” I’m wondering, was this book an attempt to resuscitate a reputation that you felt maybe had fallen into neglect unfairly?

SD: There’s some of that, but this is not intended as a resurrection, though I hope it does that. I got a wonderful letter from Paul Hendrickson, who recently wrote Hemingway’s Boat, and he said, “You restored a life.” Which is wonderful to have somebody say that to you. But I just wanted to know what happened to Charlie.

TM: Are you speaking about his suicide?

SD: The suicide to begin with, but I didn’t really know what I was going to do when I started. The first thing I did was talk to his widow briefly, and she said a couple of provocative things that got me wondering what kind of life he did have. That got me going. And once a biographer decides he has to start pursuing something, it’s very hard for him to stop until he arrives at some sort of probable answer.

TM:Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James, used to say that writing a biography is a little like falling in love. Would you agree with that?

SD: That’s a dodgy issue. If you fall in love with your subject, you can so identify with your subject that you lose something of your own self to it. The first two biographers of Malcolm Lowry, who was a suicide, they both killed themselves. Maybe they had that inclination to begin with. But there is this sense of falling out of one’s own personality into someone else’s. That can happen.

TM: There are also cases where the biographer comes to loathe the subject.

SD: Exactly.

TM: Look at Geoffrey Wolff writing about John O’Hara. That was a dark book. I saw Wolff give a talk in New York once, and he said he came to a point where he despised the man.

SD: I hadn’t heard that about Geoffrey, that’s interesting. Another case like that would be Jonathan Yardley writing a biography of Frederick Exley, and ending up hating the guy. There wasn’t much to like about him as a person, but he did some wonderful writing.

TM: I love that story you tell in your new book, about Charlie Fenton and Peter Matthiessen getting drunk and going spelunking in the New Haven sewer system. Stories like that — and the drama of Fenton’s war service, going AWOL — those are great stories. But they reminded me of what I’ve got to believe is an obstacle when writing about writers. With a few notable exceptions, they’re basically people who sit in a room all day by themselves. Is it difficult to generate drama when writing about writers?

SD: It’s certainly true that they spend a lot of time away from other people. They have to lock themselves in a room and do their work. But they come out of that room (laughs) and they have fairly vivid, not always comfortable, lives. You can think of alcoholism as a practically universal disease among twentieth-century American writers, male and female. The fact that they must do their work alone makes them different, I suppose, from someone who goes to an office. There’s some kind of small satanic kink – this is Melville — that seems to affect most writers. It seems to me they have something that makes them slightly unaccommodated to existence. I suppose there are happy writers.

TM: I’d like to meet one.

SD: (Laughs) They have difficult lives, and you try to understand the difficulty and be sympathetic with it. I’ve never had an Exley experience or a John O’Hara experience. I’ve always wound up liking as well as admiring my subjects.

TM: That makes you a lucky biographer.

SD: Well, it’s a matter of selection, too. Probably the person I knew least about was Archie MacLeish, but I came away understanding the kind of person he was. Archie didn’t hide his light under a bushel.

TM: Are there certain literary biographies you look at as masterpieces? Maybe the work of Boswell, Leon Edel, Justin Kaplan?

SD: It’s interesting that you mention Kaplan because he’s someone who’s been very helpful to me, and I really do admire his books — wonderful books on Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Edel knew what he was doing, though I’m somewhat resentful toward him because he pretty much closed the door on anyone else doing work on James while he was alive. It’s understandable — it’s my territory, right? And there are people in the Hemingway-Fitzgerald world I’ve encountered who thought it was their territory, too, and it mustn’t be invaded by others.

TM: People get territorial, don’t they?

SD: They do. And this can happen with biographers and critics as well as anybody else.

TM: Flipping that coin over, Joyce Carol Oates has talked about “pathography.” I wonder if there are biographies of writers that repelled you?

SD: I think the most biased book I know of, almost viciously biased against the subject, was Lawrence Thompson’s biography of Robert Frost. But Frost did not do the convenient thing. Thompson took on the job of being Frost’s biographer something like forty years before Frost died, and he was not allowed to publish the book until Frost was gone. That was their agreement. If Frost had died at sixty or seventy, instead of ninety, that would have been much nicer for Thompson. So there’s that side of it. And Frost had some pretty unpleasant characteristics, along with tremendous charm. Thompson simply got turned off by him. There was a relationship with a woman that involved both of them — they were rivals — there’s nothing about that in the book, of course. Thompson ends by attributing the worst possible motives to anything Frost did. It’s painful to read.

TM: I’m curious how you feel about the state of the art of literary biography today.

SD: I think there’s a lot of good stuff coming out. Robert Richardson has done books on Emerson and Thoreau that are just excellent. There are many good biographers at work today, and I even like the memoirs. My Fenton book is halfway between a memoir and a biography — I put myself in the book at the beginning, then try to be as dispassionate and disinterested a researcher as possible, then I sneak back into the book at the end. I think about a memoir like Alexandra Styron’s book about her father that was just wonderful. She writes very well, and that’s kind of important. But even poorly written biographies can be useful. If there’s a reasonable command of the material and an objectivity and an intelligence — even if that isn’t expressed well, those books can still be very valuable.

TM:Blake Bailey recently came out with well received biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever, (we wrote in a follow-up e-mail). What did you think?

SD: Rather than maunder along about Bailey and his biography (Donaldson replied by e-mail), I’m attaching an account on that subject. I haven’t published it anywhere in order to save it for (my next) book, but you’re welcome to lift whatever interests you.

(Here is an excerpt from a chapter called “The Next Biography”):

I first heard of Blake Bailey in April 2004. He e-mailed me with word that he’d contracted with Knopf for a new biography of John Cheever … (and he) wondered if I still had the tapes/transcripts/notes from my Cheever book, and if I’d be willing to share them.

It is always somewhat daunting to find out that one’s work is going to be superseded, especially when the after-comer will be granted access to materials you were denied. But with the passage of time, such things happen. So I replied, certainly, and directed Bailey to Swem Library at William & Mary, where my papers for the Cheever and other biographies were located… It was no more than any early biographer should do for a later one, as I’d learned through the generosity of Carlos Baker, who let me examine the Hemingway papers in his office at Princeton, and of Arthur Mizener and Henry Dan Piper, who allowed me to pore over their Fitzgerald documents at Cornell and Southern Illinois, respectively. Besides, I’d gone on to other subjects…

For a few months thereafter, Blake Bailey and I communicated regularly … (then) wished each other good luck and drifted out of touch. Before doing so, however, Bailey sent me a copy of the April 9, 2004 Westchester Journal News article announcing “A New Cheever Biography Planned” …Ben Cheever went on to take several sidelong swipes at my book. In others’ writing about his father, he observed, he’d always felt that “the pathology (took) up all the room.” And, more specifically, “my father used to say that to have a bad biographer was to be stuck with a bad roommate for eternity. I like the idea of him getting a good roommate at last.” That annoyed me, for I knew I hadn’t concentrated on John Cheever’s pathological problems. On the contrary, I ended with admiration for him not only as a brilliant writer whose work was indispensable to understanding the United States in the middle of the twentieth century but as a human being with the courage to take charge of his life.

When Bailey’s biography was nearing publication five years later, the family comments dismissing my previous book adopted an apologetic tone… And Bailey himself, post-publication, in The Wall Street Journal:

“I think to be fair to Scott Donaldson, he pounced before the corpse was cold and at that time Susan (and Ben) had this more propriety (sic) attitude toward their father. Enough time has passed that they wanted the definitive treatment.” On the whole, I’d just as soon do without such defenders.

Bailey’s biography achieved notable critical success, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award and becoming a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize… But Bailey fell into the trap — as I had done in my Cheever biography — of putting in too much of what he had found out… Only after turning off the switch on my ego have I finally been able to accept Bailey’s darker version of Cheever’s life as closer to the truth than my kinder, gentler account. I presented Cheever as “a man divided against himself,” the division in his spirit taking “its toll on the man even as it invigorated his work.” That still seems to me a viable approach. But it may well be that I took too sunny a view of his final years, when I portrayed him as finding renewal through his escape from alcohol… (In) Bailey’s book it becomes clear that conquering the demon of drink day by day did not substantially change Cheever’s personality or improve the acrid atmosphere at the house on Cedar Lane.

Probably I should have known better… (but) lost in admiration for his fiction, I wanted him to be a better man, I wanted him to achieve a final victory…

Perhaps no life ends happily, but I depicted Cheever — as I had Fitzgerald, a man he resembled in many ways — as heroic for overcoming addiction and soldiering on. In doing so, I may well have traveled from unjustified fault-finding to unwarranted praise.

TM: You’ve written eight literary biographies now. I know this is like asking about your favorite child, but does one of those books stand out as something that gave you particularly great satisfaction, or pride, or fulfillment?

SD: Well, I guess one way of answering is to say that the best writing I ever did, I think, was in a book called Fool for Love, about Fitzgerald. And I still think that. Maybe I was the right age or had the right sense of identification with the subject. I wrote several chapters of that book up at the MacDowell Colony, which is a wonderful place to work. You get breakfast, then you go off to your cabin in the woods and they bring you lunch and knock on the door and leave the food outside. You just work all day long. I got some great writing done on that book up there.

TM: Tell me more about what you’re working on now. You mentioned you’re calling it The Impossible Craft — I love that title. Is it a look at the craft of writing literary biography?

SD: There are three parts to this book. Part One will be a brief recounting of my own experiences as a biographer. It deals a good deal with editing, and how lucky I was to come along in the early 1960s.

TM: Why, because there were good editors around?

SD: Yeah, and editing was still done. I had Malcolm Cowley work with me on my book on Hemingway. I have wonderful letters from him. I would send him a chapter or two, and in the next mail I’d get three or four pages of commentary. This sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore. I had Peter Davison on MacLeish and I had Bob Loomis on Cheever — these are wonderful editors.

TM: Why the impossible craft?

SD: Well, because if you try to construct the ideal figure for a biographer, you realize he or she has to be so many different kinds of things that no human being could possibly achieve. You’ve got to be a detective, you’ve got to be a drudge, tracking down every possible fact you can; at the same time you’ve got to be insightful as hell, you have to be psychologically acute, you have to take an objective view of things without losing sympathy for your subject. You don’t have to be unnecessarily tough. There’s a blurb from Peter Matthiessen on the back of my Fenton book that says I was tough where I needed to be. And that’s good. You want to be honest and tell the whole story, you don’t want it to be wrapped in any more concealments than are necessary, if any are. And let’s say that the most important reason of all it’s an impossible craft is that you cannot know what someone else’s life was like. You can try to come close. Charlie Fenton’s brother said to me recently that he thinks I caught Charlie. Well, that’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. That’s what you want to do.

Bill Morris
is a staff writer for The Millions. He is the author of the novels Motor City Burning, All Souls’ Day, and Motor City, and the nonfiction book American Berserk. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, The New York Times, The (London) Independent, L.A. Weekly, Popular Mechanics, and The Daily Beast. He lives in New York City.

One of my good friends is a very successful novelist. I was with her when she was approached by another (male) writer who was attempting to deride her work: “Aren’t all your books about the same thing?” My friend asked him what he meant by that. He replied without missing a beat — “Well, aren’t they all about women?”

11 comments:

I have asked Scott Donaldson for a retraction of his false remarks, above, concerning my Cheever biography. If he refuses, then I ask for the opportunity to refute them, categorically, with all due prominence on your website.

This is an excellent interview. I look forward to reading Donaldson’s biography of Charles Fenton and to his tales of the challenge of research and writing.

I read his biography of John Cheever when it first came out and liked it very much. It was clear and solid, full of both darkness and light. I still prefer it to Bailey’s long, gloomy, exhaustive tome. Maybe Bailey’s book is closer to the real man, but Donaldson’s feels closer to the man who could write those amazing short stories.

Obviously Donaldson has not read my biography of Frederick Exley. I most certainly did not end up “hating” Exley. He was a difficult man, but there was much to love about him and that comes through in my book. Judging from the response above by Blake Bailey, it seems that Donaldson is in the habit of making public comments on books about which he knows little or nothing.

In the interest of transparency, I want to note here that we have removed a small section from the excerpted section above that related to Blake Bailey. This was done with the permission of Scott Donaldson. I’ll leave it to them if they want to comment further, here or elsewhere, on the disagreement alluded to in Bailey’s comment above..

After reading this wonderful voyage, I most certainly will read Scott Donaldson’s work and am particularly interested in his Cheever biography and “The Impossible Craft.”. After enjoying Mr. Donaldson’s lucid memory and his candid but sensitive storytelling and then reading the acerbic responses from his competitive (slightly egocentric) colleagues, i have but two wishes: that he would name his next book “The Impossible Crafters,” and that he would consider returning to William & Mary to share his gifts as it is on the top of our college search list right now.

I just finished Donaldson’s Cheever biography—about a year after reading Bailey’s—and I enjoyed it very much. Bailey’s (which I also liked a lot) feels more accurate but less true; the pathology is so up-front and inescapable that the work seems almost secondary.

I’ll have to read Fool for Love, which is one of the few Fitzgerald biographies I haven’t tried.

DEATH OF A REBEL is a fascinating read—the story of a talented individual
with great understanding of life and literature—an outstanding teacher who inspires his students—but fails in life —- alcohol and an inability to control his sexual emotions— and commits self-murder at the peak of his career.
It deals with the world of academia—its charms and pitfalls—-and documents
the loss to American literature of a rising star.

All of this has happened before and will happen again but it has sledom been written about with usch grace, understanding and compassion

Totally second the opinion about Death of a Rebel being a fascinating piece and understanding that not everyone would like to know more about Charles Fenton but still writing about him means Donaldson responded to this challenge and that’s what defines a good writer. Also, writing a biography book is nothing like wriitng a biography template. Well, writing any kind of book (especially choosing a topic) is exhausting mentally and physically. Besides, many who fear their ratings and book selling statistics would drop because of writing something out of the ordinary aren’t writer.Probably they are good but they aren’t great.
It is understandable each of us has to make a living but if you decided to be a writer, write something worth reading. Don’t you all think so?

David Rees is best known for Get Your War On, the satirical clip-art comic strip in which two colleagues, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable, discussed the War on Terror. It was consistently hilarious in nailing the linguistic and political absurdities of the Bush-Cheney era. Then, when George Bush left office in 2009, he stopped doing the strip. He subsequently set up a small artisanal pencil sharpening concern from his home in Beacon, N.Y. His new book, How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening, is the product of that new project. It’s a very, very funny book, but he’s not just kidding around. It’s an exercise in sustained seriocomic tone that somehow manages to be both elaborately ironic and completely sincere at the same time. He also really knows a lot about sharpening pencils.

The Millions: I have to say that, as much as I’ve enjoyed the book, one of the effects of reading it is that it’s become much more difficult for me to sharpen pencils. I now feel very intimidated by the whole process, whereas before I just did it without too much thought.

David Rees: Well, the whole point of the book was to try to defamiliarize pencil-sharpening as an activity, so that people would just approach it from square one again. One of the things I liked about starting the artisanal pencil sharpening business was that it made me think about pencils in greater depth than I probably ever had in my life. And the more I thought about them the more I appreciated them as really efficient, elegant tools. But sharpening pencils is always a little intimidating, especially with the single-blade pocket sharpener, where you might break the tip or you might not be satisfied with how it turns out. Frankly I think the book is meant to make sharpening pencils simultaneously less and more intimidating.

TM: One of the things I wasn’t really aware of before I read the book is the cultural differences between Europe and the U.S. in terms of pencil sharpening practice. You’ve got a whole chapter on wall-mounted pencil sharpeners, and that was completely alien to me as an Irish person. I’d never heard of such a thing.

DR: Are you being serious?

TM: Completely serious. Are they a common feature of American classrooms?

DR: Yeah, absolutely. They’re the first sharpeners that I remember using. They are very much a part of many Americans’ childhood. And that whole chapter is kind of about nostalgia and growing older, about how different it is to encounter something like that when you’re an old man like me, rather than a kid who’s full of promise. You can call me the Proust of pencil sharpeners, I’ll take that honorific.

TM: It’s all yours. So I’m interested in how the structure of etiquette surrounding pencil sharpening differs between the U.S. and Ireland. First of all, when I was a kid we didn’t even use the term “pencil sharpener.” We called them “pencil parers” or, sometimes, “toppers.”

DR: Jesus Christ. What kind of backward society is Ireland?

TM: Listen, it’s a national embarrassment. You’d put up your hand and ask the teacher for permission to go to a bin in the corner of the room, and you’d sharpen it directly over the bin.

DR: See, I like wall-mounted pencil sharpeners in American classrooms because it’s one of the last vestiges of a communal good in our free-market society. It’s something that everybody uses. I’m surprised to hear that you communists overseas are using your own individual sharpeners in classrooms. It’s a very Ayn-Randian position to take. “I’ve got my pencil sharpener, fuck you if you can’t afford a pencil sharpener! Sharpen your pencil with your bootstrap!”

TM: Tell me about the origin of your interest in pencils. You’re known as a cartoonist, but your best known work doesn’t involve any actual drawing. Get Your War On, and pretty much everything else I’ve seen of yours, is all clip art.

DR: I always found the penciling and inking of cartoons to be completely onerous and beside the point, because I was just interested in the writing. So for me the pencil sharpening doesn’t really bear any relationship to the cartooning. It all came out of working for the Census Bureau. A couple of years ago, I quit cartooning and didn’t have any money, so I just got a job working for the United States Census, going from door to door. And on the first day of staff training they gave us this bag of supplies for the months ahead, with pencils and a little tiny pencil sharpener, and told us all to sharpen our pencils. And I thought I’d rather get paid to do this than go around knocking on strangers’ doors and get yelled at by paranoiacs.

TM: Did you get a lot of that hardcore anti-Fed stuff?

DR: There was a very small amount of that, but it wasn’t as explicitly political as I thought it would be. I dealt with one man who was mentally unstable and literally a SWAT team became involved. When you get to an address and there’s nobody home, you leave a message for them telling them to call you. And when I got home that night there was a really angry voice mail from this guy who was really upset, like “why are you in my house?” I called him back and said I was just looking for information, and he told me he was going through a really hard time. You’re not supposed to escalate situations like that or anything. The next day I was back in the neighborhood and noticed the house was surrounded by guys in Kevlar vests with automatic rifles. I talked to one of the cops, and it turned out the guy had gone off his meds and thought that his neighbors had been in his house and that they’d killed his mom. He’d thrown a brick at his neighbor and told people he was inside with a gun. It was really scary and not fun, but everything resolved itself with a minimum of violence. But that’s not your typical census story.

TM: What kind of reactions do you get from people when you’re doing live sharpening, from people who are just coming to it cold, and don’t have any idea about you or what you do?

DR: Well, it depends on the demographic. Some people are like, “Oh, I get it, it’s an art project.” Or like, “Oh, I get it it’s an Internet prank, or a big huge joke.” And none of those are entirely correct. It is a real thing. I am actually doing this. I’ve done almost 500 pencils for paying customers now. Some people have a hard time understanding, and then you literally just tell them exactly what happens: I have a website. People send me $15 through the Internet and then I sharpen a pencil for them, and then I fill out all this paperwork and send it to them. And then the conversation usually ends in stunned silence or just an avalanche of questions.

TM: It seems to me like a joke that is also, paradoxically, 100 percent serious.

DR: Etsy.com, the arts and crafts site, ran an excerpt of the book, but they ran it on April 1st, so the comments were all like “Oh, what an amazingly thorough and well-documented April Fools prank.” And a friend of mine summed it up in kind of a good way, by saying that the joke is that there is no joke. Obviously, the publisher decided to market the book as a humor book, but my goal was always — and you can’t do this for obvious marketing reasons — but I was like, “we should market it as a how-to book, because that’s the form that it assumes.” Granted, it gets a little crazy towards the end, but that’s basically the form of the book.

TM: I was really struck by the tone of the book. It seems weirdly refined in a way that was oddly familiar to me, but that I couldn’t quite place.

DR: That’s because it’s the voice that God speaks to you with when he answers your prayers. But for years, I have collected early-to-mid 20th-century industrial manuals and how-to guides. And a lot of those books are written in a slightly elevated, gentlemanly tone. Like, “The reader will be forgiven for thinking that this die cast mold will produce…” And for me, that tone is just so intoxicating. It’s slightly aspirational, like it’s written for the gentleman plumber or something. It’s fascinating, because these are blue-collar manuals, but the writing is often so much more ambitious and literary than what you would expect if you went to a Home Depot today and just bought a book called How to Put Up Fucking Drywall. That’s why I wanted the book to have poems in it and references to Biblical verses, because I really wanted to pay homage to all those books in my personal library.

TM: Reading it, I kept asking myself what you were satirizing. And then I kind of realized that you weren’t really satirizing anything.

DR: Right. It’s not so much trying to satirize anything as just elevate pencil sharpening, and defamiliarize it so that people can realize how awesome it is. The joke isn’t like, “Oh, sharpening pencils is so stupid. What if I goof off and make it sound important.” I’m into it. It’s satisfying. And I have some kick-ass pencil sharpeners. I think my background as a satirical political cartoonist informed a lot of peoples’ preconceptions about what this project was. And I’m trying to be careful in the tone of the book to make sure I’m not just shitting on Etsy people or craft fairs or something. It’s not a mean-spirited project in the way that Get Your War On could be.

TM: There are a couple of moments where it recalls Get Your War On, like where you suggest the reader grab the audience’s attention before a novelty pencil sharpening technique by saying “I’m about to straight skull-fuck your mind.” But in general it feels like the work of a completely different person.

DR: I get really impatient with projects after a while. I like switching my voice and switching modes. But here’s the other way that the book functions a little differently, that I don’t think anyone will pick up on other than me and one other person. Me starting my pencil sharpening business over the last two years coincided with the end of my marriage. And the book, in a way, is kind of like a memoir of the last two years of my life, disguised as a pencil sharpening manual. I know that sounds super-pretentious and ambitious, but it’s in there in terms of references and throwaway lines. I sent a copy to my ex, who now lives in Paris, and she just picked up immediately on things that I hadn’t even noticed about the book. Like just how much of my life as an adult was in the book. So in a way, the book has like an elegiac or melancholy vibe underneath all of it. Because part of the point of the book is that when your whole life is collapsing, you might very well become obsessed with pencils. Or just any kind of weird, random thing that you can lose yourself in that’s just completely removed from all the emotional concerns that are whirling around your head.

TM: Obviously there are lines in the book where you mention your ex-wife, but for whatever reason I just sort of glossed over those references. Possibly because I read the narrating voice as the voice of a character you’d created rather than you yourself.

DR: I wouldn’t say I’m playing a character. But I get what your saying, in so far as those little mentions of my ex-wife are supposed to be kind of jarring, to catch you up short, to hint at something unspoken that’s running through the whole narrative, to the extent that it is a narrative. I initially wrote an introduction in my own voice, and the publisher said, “No we don’t need this, it gets in the way of the character.” And I would always get upset when he would call it a character. Like, I get that I’m all dressed up and making funny faces and writing in a weird voice. But it’s not just a character. It’s me writing about my life in the language of these industrial manuals, as if those are the limits of my language for this project. And I have to express technical information and emotional information in this voice. So I’m glad we cut the introduction in the end, because I think the foreword John Hodgeman wrote puts it in the real world in enough of a way. But I do think of this book as a book about myself. I’m like every other 30-something, middle-class white person: I feel like the world owes me my best-selling memoir. But I guess, in the end, this pencil-sharpening book will have to do.

TM: Well, maybe coming at it from a weird slant is the best way to write a memoir.

DR: Yeah, maybe it is. Because I love coming at things from oblique angles, or setting up constraints. That’s why using clip-art is so fun. Like with Get Your War On, it was like, let’s just fucking work these two pieces of clip art to death, and just do everything you can within those constraints.

TM: It’s just occurring to me now, because I’m holding the book in one hand and a classic Staedtler #2 pencil in the other, that the design of the book is modeled on the yellow and black color scheme of the pencil.

DR: Yeah, exactly. Also, you probably haven’t noticed this, but at the top of the book the threading is pink, and at the bottom the threading is dark. That represents the eraser and the tip of the pencil. That was the designer’s idea — when he told me about it I nearly creamed my pants. You could say we almost over-thought this motherfucker.

TM: I think you did about the right amount of thinking. But the knowledge you’re laying down here is incredibly detailed and thorough. You think you might be in danger of putting yourself out of business?

DR: It’s not a worry. In fact, it’s the goal. I don’t want to do this forever. I wanted to just throw open the doors of my workshop and just share my secrets. Whenever an article gets written about my pencil sharpening business, there’s always someone who’s like “Fifteen dollars? I’ll do it for ten!” And I’m always like: “You know what? It’s a free market economy, knock yourself out. Let’s see what you got.” It’s enough for me to know that I’m first in field, as they say. I invented this industry, and I’m happy to share what I’ve learned, and hopefully empower people to sharpen their own pencils.

TM: So is there an optimum degree of sharpness for a pencil in your view? I find I get obsessed with having as sharp a tip as possible, to the point where I spend as much time sharpening as actually writing with the thing. Because, of course, the sharper the tip the more likely it is to break.

DR: That’s true. And obviously there are so many metaphors you can make about sharpening a pencil, and the tension between trying to have an idealized tip and a practically usable tip. At some point, you just have to trust that the point is good enough and just put it to the page and get to work. As opposed to just doing what I’ve done my entire adult life, which is just staying trapped in my head and being terrified of engaging with the world because it will be less than perfect. If you have to write about your own emotional and psychological shortcomings and traumas in the guise of an industrial manual, pencil sharpening is a great one to do because it’s so obviously symbolic and metaphorical. There’s a tension between trying to make something perfect and actually having to be in the world and make use of it. For me it’s useful to keep that tension in mind and to remember that it’s great to have a pencil mounted and displayed on your wall, but it’s also just great to have a pencil in your pocket.

In February, an editor asked me if I’d be willing to read a weighty, new book and review it, since she’d been hearing murmurs that not only was it an incredible read, but that it was also going to be one of the “big deal” books of the year. My editor was right. Recently, A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara, hit the longlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize.

Throughout the process of writing about her work, Yanagihara herself remained a mystery to me. I read the reviews and the few interviews, and her publicity team did that thing where they send you a tote bag. But further inquiries eventually allowed me to set up an interview, albeit by email. Having read her books, and having seen that she is a discreet and apparently quite private person (no Twitter account here), I wanted to see what she was like, where she came from, and what her thoughts were on the content she works with in “real life,” that life that stands behind every writer’s authorial magic.

The Millions: I’ve read that you were born in Hawaii. Did you grow up there? When did you move to New York, and what was that process like?

Hanya Yanagihara: I was actually born in L.A.; from there, we moved to Honolulu, and then to New York, and then Baltimore, and then Irvine, and then Honolulu, and then a small town in Texas called Tyler—I moved back to Honolulu when I was in high school. I came to New York almost immediately after college; like generations of people, I was beguiled by the city. It was 1995, and it wasn’t particularly difficult, in part because I was so ignorant that I didn’t even know what I should be intimidated by—I just bumbled into town, and within a month had a roommate, an apartment and a job as a sales assistant at Ballantine, which is an imprint of Random House. It was only years later that I truly understood both how lucky I’d been, and how clueless I was.

TM: Why did your family move around so much? Did you like the experience, did it teach you something?

HY: My father was a researcher for many years, and so we moved for his career — and because he was often beguiled by one place or another: California, Texas. In general, I liked the experience, though there were places I liked more than others. However, it taught me that I can always find a person or two for company, even in inhospitable environments, and that a life can be created anywhere. Not happily, necessarily, but a life nonetheless.

TM: Your “About the Author” page in your most recent book, A Little Life, reads only: “Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City.” Are you a private person? Or did you assume simply that if people wanted to know more about you they could google you and find where else you wrote online?

HY: I just don’t think more information makes a difference — or it shouldn’t, at any rate. If you’re writing a nonfiction book or declaring yourself an authority on one subject or another, then yes, you probably need to detail your credentials in some way. But for fiction, it’s irrelevant. Your book won’t be any better or worse than it already is if you’ve published in a particular magazine or not, and your reader won’t appreciate the book any more or less if you have or haven’t. I wouldn’tve had a biography at all, except my publisher said I had to.

TM: When did you start writing, as far as you can remember?

HY: Probably when I was five or six. I was in fact more interested in drawing; words were something to accompany images. My grandfather owned a small print shop, and so there was always lots of thick, cottony paper lying around. I was very fortunate to have parents who encouraged both of these interests — although there’s a long tradition of artists who had to rebel against their parents’ expectations in order to pursue their crafts, I’ve been privileged to have been raised by people who actually spent years hoping I might be a cartoonist when I grew up. They were very naive when it came to money, which was frustrating in many ways but had its benefits as well.

TM: Were you a reader as young as you were a writer? What do you think were your literary influences in writing the novels you’ve written?

HY: My parents never skimped on books, but I don’t think I was a particularly precocious reader — I’ve never asked. And while my books don’t have any deliberate literary antecedents, I can tell you that the contemporary writers I admire most are Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro, and John Banville. Banville because he just writes so beautifully; no one can craft a sentence as distinctively and gorgeously as he can. But as much as I admire writers who are consistently, recognizably themselves book after book, I also admire those who are constantly reinventing what their novel, and the novel, is. I marvel at how all of Ishiguro’s books are united by one or two thematic ideas, and yet are so textually and texturally different each time — I’m not sure how he does it. Mantel is another of those shape-shifters — her early work is very brittle and funny, a series of salty confections, and then her style changed completely with The Giant, O’Brien: everything — tone, language, sentences, rhythms — became something new, yet remained uniquely and identifiably hers.

TM: You’ve written two novels now but you were also editor-at-large for Conde Nast Traveler. How do you differentiate writing fiction from non-fiction?

YH: The kind of writing I did for Traveler was largely what magazine editors call “service writing”: that is, short, information-dense blurbs. I’ve always appreciated this kind of writing, and appreciated people who can do it well. The emphasis is less on form than it is on the efficient, pithy, authoritative conveyance of facts; such writing is the bedrock of all glossy magazine journalism. I found it relaxing, as well as satisfying: so much of this type of magazine work is fitting words to space, not the other way around, and is thus a largely visual exercise. I also found it helpful to be able to practice such a different form of writing than I do with my fiction — you’re using language, of course, but the means towards which you’re deploying that language are very different. Mostly, though, my work at Traveler — and now at T magazine, where I started a new job about a month ago — was as an editor. Working at a magazine has taught me skills (unglamorous ones, perhaps) that’ve been useful in fiction: it teaches you how to pace and structure a story, whether that story is 500 or 5,000 or 50,000 words; it teaches you about deadlines, and the importance of obeying them; and it teaches you about turning in as clean a first draft as possible, about having respect for the story and for the first person — your editor — who’ll read it. And finally, it teaches you that after a certain point, you have to just file the piece. It may not be perfect. It never will be. But a few more hours or days or weeks of tinkering and fussing are likely never to elevate it from good to astonishing.

TM: I wonder how you feel about “click-bait” titles. Looking through your travel articles for Conde Nast Traveler – though not your current job anymore – the titles are so similar to many that can be found on other, less prestigious, and more bloggy websites. Just for example, the first two: “Three New Books to Bring on Your Next Trip” and “How to Get the Most Out of a Travel Specialist.” How do you feel about the internet readership culture that has made titles like this necessary?

HY: Oh, well, this is just part of having a job in any sort of publication whose digital strategy is based on traffic (which is to say, almost all of them). There are some stories you write just for eyeballs, and others that are re-titled by the web team to sound grabbier. It happens everywhere. I suppose I don’t have strong feelings about it; when you’re working at a consumer publication, your job is to attract readers, which in turn attracts greater traffic, which in turn attracts advertisers, who then give the publication money, which pays for your job. Sometimes there’s a nuanced story beneath that clickbait headline; sometimes there isn’t. But I understand the need for such reductive titles — there’s too much content online for subtlety.

TM: Do you think the internet needs some sort of quality control? Or do you accept that we’re just watching the evolution of how journalism and entertainment are conveyed?

HY: I’m not even sure how you’d do that. And I don’t think it’s even necessary: people who want trash will always be able to find it, and that doesn’t just apply to the world of online writing — it applies to print journalism as well. Or film. Or books. Or art. Or food! The dangerous or unfortunate thing would be if trash came to totally eclipse the non-trash — but I don’t think that’s happened yet.

TM: Returning again to your novel, A Little Life – I wonder what it was like to conceive of, ingest, digest, and then write the characters in the novel, and more specifically, the extremely traumatic events some of them remember or go through. How harrowing was the process, and how did you manage those scenes?

HY: The one truly difficult section to write was the part about Jude’s time with Dr. Traylor in the fifth part of the book. This wasn’t just the fact of the story itself, though; I was in Japan on my annual holiday, and feeling despondent for a number of reasons. Normally, this trip is the most blissful event of the year for me, but that year, it just wasn’t. Part of this, of course, was attributable to the book, and what felt like its urgency to announce itself on the screen. So I’d be walking through streets and temples that have never failed to bring me joy, and all I could think about was this section, and how I needed to exorcise it. And so I did, writing it over the course of four nights. I cut my sightseeing short and came back to the hotel at 4pm on each of those days, and wrote until 1 or 2am. It was the worst—the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating—writing experience I’d had. And not necessarily because I think that’s the most upsetting part of the book; but it was the time when I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I’d somehow become possessed by it. Much of the process of writing A Little Life was a seesaw between giving myself over to the flow and rhythm of writing it, which at its best, even in its darkest moments, felt as glorious as surfing; it felt like being carried aloft on something I couldn’t conjure but was lucky enough to have caught, if for just a moment. At its worst, I felt I was somehow losing my ownership over the book. It felt, oddly, like being one of those people who adopt a tiger or lion when the cat’s a baby and cuddly and manageable, and then watch in dismay and awe when it turns on them as an adult.

TM: Those nights writing so intensely in Japan – is that your usual process in terms of writing fiction? Having a few days of intense, impossible, yet exhilarating word-production, or do you usually write slower or with a certain method in mind?

HY: No, it was unusual. There are occasions when I go on binges, but because my job doesn’t really allow time for binges, I’ve trained myself to use the hours I do have efficiently.

I had never heard of singer/songwriter Josh Ritter, but I was moved to find out about him because his debut novel, Bright’s Passage, received very positive notices. Additionally, I was curious because of the diverse backgrounds of the people (Thomas Ricks, Jesse Kornbluth, Dennis Lehane, and Robert Pinsky) who were singing his praises.

Bright’s Passage tells the story of WWI veteran and widower Henry Bright taking flight from both a raging forest fire and his malevolent in-laws. His passage takes place in the company of his infant son and an unusual guardian angel in the Appalachian foothills of West Virginia as Bright’s recollections range from his childhood to his traumatic experiences in the killing fields of France. It’s a tale told with great assurance and skill as might be expected from so skillful a songwriter.

Josh Ritter and I spoke in late June 2011, when Bright’s Passage first came out and the discussion ranged across writing fiction and songs, books he loves, making music, growing up in Moscow, Idaho with a love of reading, and more. Bright’s Passage is out in paperback today.

RB: What was growing up in Moscow, Idaho like?

JR: It was good. I don’t have much to compare it to. We grew up pretty far out of town — my brother who is four years younger than me and my folks and kind of parade of psychopathic dogs.

RB: What distinguishes a psychopathic dog?

JR: I haven’t figured that out.

RB: I haven’t checked a map — is Moscow near a river, and thus its name?

JR: No. No one quite knows. It’s the same with Idaho as a name. No one really knows where the name came from. There are a lot of theories.

RB: The Indian word for “potato” (laughs).

JR: Somebody said it was based on real estate, like a sub-division, like “Hardwood Acres.” No one really knows.

RB: Not an Indian word.

JR: No, no. And Moscow was the same sort of thing. Some people said it was from Russian immigrants. It was originally called Hog Heaven.

RB: (Laughs).

JR: And then they decided they wanted to get some girls there and so they called it Paradise Valley. And then Moscow finally.

RB: You’d think they might have changed the name during the Cold War because of John Birchers.

JR: Yeah, yeah. There’s a big file out there somewhere.

RB: When did you leave Idaho? How old?

JR: Eighteen. And then I moved back after I lived here in Boston for a while. And then to New York.

RB: Why back to Idaho?

JR: I was on the road all the time and there was a moment when I realized that I was going to freak out unless I had something familiar. And it was, in a way. Coming back gave me a sense of familiarity I really needed at the time.

RB: No big airport that was conveniently located?

JR: There’s Boise but that’s eight and a half hours south.

RB: So Moscow is up north. Is there much evidence of Native American culture?

JR: Definitely. All around — there is Nez Perce to the south and Coeur d’Alene to the north. All kinds, Blackfoot, all kinds around.

RB: So you came east when you were 18.

JR: First to Oberlin, to college. And then from there to Boston. (Actually I lived a block down the street from here.)

RB: Oberlin has a fine music department, though little known on the East Coast.

JR: Amazing music department. I took some [courses]. I still play with Zack who I met there. He’s an amazing bass player. And then Darius, who is my manager, who I met there as well, were roommates. So it was great for music — lots of music-minded people went there.

RB: Somewhere in Ohio—

JR: The old Northwest.

RB: Did Oberlin have a football team?

JR: It actually did and it lost the entire time I was there. They did not win a single game.

RB: (Laughs).

JR: It became a point of pride.

RB: I read that you began writing Bright’s Passage, this, your first novel, at Oberlin, which reportedly was written because you felt you couldn’t express certain things in a song.

JR: I always felt that the songs — my favorite songs are usually stories. A lot of times I feel like a song can be an instant. Like a love song, but there is always a setting. Always a sentiment expressed. Always, you know, a moment. And in other songs there can be a whole story. So I think songs are really great, kind of, delivery vehicles for a story. They allow you to make your own conclusions. Good songs never give you everything. So I really believe a song is like an envelope. A novel, you can unfold from a song. Say like “Tennessee Stud” or “Isis” or “The River.” Or “Famous Blue Raincoat.” You could unfold stories from them. So I was finishing my last record and I had a bunch of long narrative songs on there. I was pretty much done and I had this song and I thought it might be too long. It might make the record — there would just be one too many of these longer songs. But I had nowhere else to put it. So, I figured that I had been talking about it for a while — how songs and novels were closely related. So I thought I would just do it, you know. Or try it. I had come out of a long spell of not really feeling excited about some of the writing. And suddenly I was writing all these songs and then I didn’t really turn off the tap. So I just started writing this [Bright’s Passage] without thinking too much about it. It was exciting — it began as an experiment.

RB: So as you are writing this novel do you know how it’s going to end?

JR: No. No.

RB: That was a discovery made along the way.

JR: Absolutely.

RB: So why a novel and not a short story — it’s a big jump from songs.

JR: I have never been interested in short stories.

RB: You don’t read them?

JR: I mean, I read them. I read a lot of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver and Dashiell Hammett stuff. Mostly because I felt like I needed to relax in something.

RB: Reportedly people read short fiction less today — which I don’t understand given the demands on time that exist.

JR: Right, yeah.

RB: But many writers will say that short fiction is more difficult. Less forgiving.

JR: That’s true. I agree. I totally agree. The thing about good writing is concision and when it’s a song in which you tell a story, it has to be as tight as possible. You cannot have anything that’s going to obfuscate if you are telling a story in a song. You can do lots of missteps in a novel or go off on some tangents and still bring it back.

RB: I agree that songs are stories — what’s the difference in writing a song and writing fiction?

JR: Well, I guess there’s a time frame element. Which is that you can write a song — it may take an afternoon. It may take eight minutes or a week. But it’s a fairly short amount of time. And then when you are done you constantly play it for people and get that excitement of kind of pulling the sheet off of the statue and saying, “I did this.” That instant gratification — which is a great feeling. With a novel you sit and work on it, little bit by little bit, every day. People see you working with your headphones on and then you close the computer or you put down the pen and you have nothing that you are going to show for that day. That kind of thing was a big adjustment for me. I wrote the first draft in two months and then the subsequent 10 drafts over the next year.

RB: Ten drafts, wow.

JR: It was a big first experience for me.

RB: Ten drafts before it went to an editor at a publisher.

JR: I had several drafts before an editor came in and looked at it. And then that process — it was a lot like a song. You write a song first. The song is done in your mind. Then you work with a producer and they pose problems for you to solve. It was a great experience.

RB: Everyone needs an editor.

JR: Yeah, yeah. It’s like an extra set of ears. Yeah, yeah.

RB: How long have you been out touting Bright’s Passage?

JR: Basically since yesterday. (Laughs).

RB: So is the book tour integrated into the music tour?

JR: I’ll never read and do a show at the same time — luckily, I travel for the music and then I go and read at bookstores or something like that. Yeah, I love it. The experience of writing the novel was such a fantastic experience. I have read so much more since. And I have gotten a whole other appreciation for the books I love and reasons to understand books I might not like very much. And also to have a lot more sympathy for stuff I don’t like. Because I know how hard it was to do.

RB: Talking about books you love. What are some of those?

JR: The very first books I really remember loving was a series called The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. They’re the first books I ever read on my own. They are beautiful books — kind of Welsh mythology. And then all those fantasy books like J.R.R. Tolkien and then moving on to Carl Sagan and Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke—and 2001. Lots of those. Moving forward, all sorts of history books. You know one of the great things about growing up where we grew up is that we had a TV, but we only got two stations. We lived out in the woods and we didn’t have a car to drive anywhere. Not that we would have had anywhere to go. So reading became a really important thing. We never thought about it as something different; it was just that it was all there was to do once you got home at the end of the day.

RB: So your so-called formative years were full of books.

JR: Yeah.

RB: Did your reading level off when you entered a wider world? When on tour do you read a lot?

JR: Yeah. On tour you have to do stuff to stay busy. Luckily the band I’m in all the guys are all pretty big readers. That’s nice. You don’t come into a place and the TV is instantly on. I love watching TV, but feel like it fractures your brain before you go on stage. We pass books around — we were passing around Neal Stephenson. Neil Gaiman as well — American Gods, which everybody passed around. It’s fun — whatever is getting passed around is really good. I get all sorts of great stuff from Zack [bass player].

RB: Do the people who like your music know you like to read?

JR: Yes.

RB: Do people send you books?

JR: Yes, all the time. Or after shows, they give me books. I usually make little notes about what I am reading at the time. I’m reading William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways and Robert Penn Warren.

RB: So you are beginning to be interviewed for the book — are those interviews much different than for your music?

JR: I thought it would be roughly similar. In some ways it is. But I feel like with songs, there are so many other things to talk about. Production choices — all these sorts of things. With a book you are dealing with one kind of long extended idea. Also, you write something and you don’t necessarily know what it means until you’re done. Really, what you were actually thinking about. Or what you think you were thinking about. I like that about records as well, but it is interesting to suddenly be kind of holding myself to account about a longer piece of writing, really wondering what it is.

RB: There is so much that is subjective about it. You may read a book when you are 20 years old and then when you re read it later you have a different view. Which may happen with your own writing– being really pleased.

JR: Yeah, really. That’s magical. Or embarrassing. (Laughs).

RB: You seem very happy with what you do.

JR: Yeah, I am.

RB: So you are encouraged to do more?

JR: Absolutely. I understand song writing in some ways because I have been doing it for 10 or 12 years now. At this point I wanted something new — something that made me nervous or made me feel like I didn’t know what was going on. And I really felt sorta like I was a horse in a field and I look over and see a whole other field. And I want to be over there.

RB: Out of your comfort zone.

JR: Yeah, totally. In so many different ways. I feel with a song, people get a glimpse of a part of what you are thinking and a little bit of your brain. With a novel the vulnerability seems much larger. People can see you for all you might be or potentially how simple you actually are. Which is funny.

RB: I assume you want to get “better” as a novelist/writer?

JR: Yeah.

RB: How would you go about that?

JR: You just gotta keep on doing it. I really do think that showing up is the biggest part. While I put stock in school, I really think that school only teaches you that you don’t know very much. And get used to that. Like knowing the limits of your own abilities is good. I never thought that going to school would make me a better writer; maybe a more aware writer. But I didn’t go to school to write songs and I didn’t feel the necessity to go to school to begin to write a novel. Writing the novel was certainly going to school for me. And I have learned a great deal at least about what I think I want to do better on my next one. It’s funny I was reading this thing that Annie Dillard said — the reason you have writers who have written 12 books is because they have been dissatisfied every time. (Laughs). Which is cool.

RB: Are you dissatisfied after you write a song?

JR: No

RB: You don’t feel that there is more you can do?

JR: I mean in that way, most of the songs I throw out, not throw out, but I don’t use 85 percent of what I write — cuz, I just don’t want people to see it, you know. And the stuff that’s there, that actually makes it on a record is stuff that I know is good. Maybe people won’t like it, but I know I liked it and I know why. And over time I will still feel happy performing it. I won’t dissociate.

RB: So, have you begun your next fiction?

JR: Yeah, I wrote a fair portion and then decided I wanted to go back and restart. But I have a really good idea. I don’t feel stressed out by it

RB: There is no pressure on you to write fiction?

JR: No.

RB: There must be some for song writing?

JR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s pressure, but it’s pressure to account for myself. When people buy a book and give you a chance — I see it as they are buying a book to read, but they are really giving me a chance to go and do something else. My job is to write. I love it. I love it. I’m in this great incredible position right now to be able to write and enjoy it and the pressure is to make it good and to make it good the way I feel it should be.

RB: Well, it’s a different pressure than worrying about your kid’s dental bills, or the mortgage

JR: Yeah — right.

RB: What’s your vision or sense of your future? Continuing writing?

JR: Yes, definitely.

RB: Movies?

JR: (Laughs). I would love to write a movie. And I would love to write another 10 novels. There is a place to put stories now that isn’t just in songs. And that’s really important. Not just because it’s fun but for me right now. It’s really important because I want to continue to feel hungry — really hungry and get a sense — I get a real buzz off of writing.

RB: It’s impressive that apparently you can write anywhere. As far as know, not many writers do that.

JR: Yeah, I guess when I was deep, really having trouble writing I asked Robert Pinsky who I’ve gotten to know. He’s got grandkids, he travels a lot and he’s doing all this stuff and he has a lot of demands on his time. I asked him if he believes in writer’s block? He said that if you ever have an empty stretch of time coming up, fill it. Like with stuff. Fit your poems in, you know. And I really think that’s true. If you are going to be real precious about where you write then you are kind of admitting you are easily swayed by everything. And mostly I just like to put on music that doesn’t have words. And I sit, put on my headphones and I have a much easier time writing prose on the road than I do writing music. Which is nice, it’s nice to feel productive in another way.

RB: Speaking of people you know, how do you come to know [journalist] Thomas Ricks?

JR: In 2006 he was working on Fiasco. And he heard “Girl in the War,” which is a song of mine, and he wrote a section of his book to the record. So he wrote me a note and we met and when I was in Washington D.C. he gave me a tour of The Washington Post, which I was totally geeked out on. It was awesome. And then we have stayed really close friends.

RB: You must be very active to have these contacts outside the world of music? Are you a pop musician?

JR: I would say so. I am certainly not — it’s amazing how a song can go through the ether to people and find them and if they are interested, it’s easy to find out more. The people that I have met doing this stuff have been though music. Dennis Lehane — he wrote some of his book to a record of mine. That just happens that way. And it’s really cool that they will give me some time to try this.

RB: Have you talked to your writer fans about writing fiction?

JR: I talked to Ricks a bunch about it, yeah. He has a beautiful way of looking at it.

RB: Is he retired from The Post?

JR: Yeah, he’s writing books now and has this defense blog. He is working on a history of American generalship from WWII to the present. It’s a big one.

RB: Is there any way that writing fiction has interfered with writing music?

JR: It’s true that it used to be if I had an idea for a song I would never think about is this idea for a book. But thankfully they are different enough I get so much energy from performing and recording and it’s such a social activity with my gang, my wolf pack of people that I love. I could never give that up. I love writing for the group I am with. And I don’t think I would be satisfied writing — I am very lucky because if I was sitting and just obsessing over [writing] I wouldn’t be as happy as I am when I go and work and play.

RB: You have choices.

JR: That’s it, yeah.

RB: Give me a sense of how much you tour?

JR: It used to be 150 to 175 dates a year. You’d be on the road eight or nine months a year. Some days off in between.

RB: I wonder how cultural information [books, movies, music] impacts anyone who creates things. How does it reach you as you crisscross the country? Do you travel outside the country also?

JR: Yeah, all over the place. All over Europe and Australia. Not too much in Asia although I ‘d love to — it’s great. Basically every day you wake up and you meet new people and find your way around a town. There’s time for reading and you meet people after shows and they give you books. I think that’s what people who are writers do. They assimilate whatever is — all the stuff people are thinking. You get a range of different impulses and you try and write about it.

RB: Lots of visual information that’s almost subliminal.

JR: Definitely. I remember reading Johnny Cash’s biography and him saying that after so many years traveling that he could wake up and know within five miles where he was in the country. And I thought he was full of crap.

RB: (Laughs).

JR: But it turned out as time went by at least you know what state you are in. (Laughs).

RB: Who are some of your musical idols, for lack of a better word?

JR: Of course for inventiveness and seeming fearlessness, somebody like Tom Waits has been — I would buy whatever he puts out. I like that he is just trying things. [Bob] Dylan is inescapable. Radiohead, like Tom Waits for their inventiveness and their searching. And there’s people like Alfred Deller—

RB: Early European music–

JR: Yeah. Counter-tenors. Gillian Welch has a new record out who I love. Lucinda Williams. I like Jay-Z. I like a lot of stuff. I like people more and more like Neil Young who have chosen to make music and I can tell how they have chosen to live their life. Which is important to me.

RB: Young strikes me as an authentic renegade.

JR: Yeah and he also has a family and has a good family life.

RB: I am trying to think of who else has stayed on top of their game — Leonard Cohen. He got screwed by his manager. On the other hand that’s how many people wake up after Enron and the like.

JR: I saw him [Cohen] at the Beacon in New York. I never have cried at a show. I am always too busy watching what’s going on. I lost myself totally that day.

RB: He is pretty compelling and poignant. I came to like him later in his career especially after his album Ten New Songs with “That Don’t Make It Junk.”

JR: And “Alexandra Leaving.” That’s an amazing song.

RB: I was glad to see that my musical tastes hadn’t calcified and that I was still open.

JR: That is really cool. It’s interesting that you say that — so many people respond to his earlier stuff and have trouble getting in to his later stuff.

RB: Do you have a title for the next book?

JR: No.

RB: Did Bright’s Passage have a title when you began it?

JR: No.

RB: Like Steve Martin says, You started out with a blank sheet and pen.

JR: That’s how it is with records too. The title is always the last thing to come. It’s the last distillation of whatever you are working on.